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This thesis explores the impact of physical activity--what I have chosen to call “moments of movement” -- inside the classroom throughout the elementary school day. Journal-based observations were made by a student teacher placed in a special education 4th-6th grade writing and reading resource classroom from August-December of 2018 and a fourth grade general education classroom from January-May of 2019. All observations were made at Adams Elementary School, a Title 1 school, in the Mesa, Arizona school district. At this K-6 grade school, many students live with the challenges of poverty, neglect, unstable family dynamics, and trauma. Because the teachers work tirelessly to cultivate a sense of home for the students, there is a strong emphasis on non-traditional teaching methods, including the AVID program and the Kagan, and Tribes strategies.
Ms. Norris (the special education teacher) and Ms. Foss (the fourth grade teacher) both have strong backgrounds in fitness and naturally incorporate physical activity in their classrooms, which is not something typically found at elementary schools. In this paper, physical activity strategies in classrooms of Ms. Norris and Ms. Foss are analyzed, as well as the benefits of implementing these strategies. The impact of these “moments of movement” on the whole class and individual students is discussed, and suggestions are made to help educators incorporate “moments of movement” into their own classrooms. Educators can use the strategies present at Adams Elementary School as a model for incorporating exercise in their own classrooms.
Drylands cover almost half of the land surface on Earth, yet there is still little understood of the processes in these ecosystems. This project studied the impact of macroclimate (precipitation and temperature in large regions) in comparison to microclimate (the climate under canopy versus in the open) to learn more about the drivers of litter decomposition in drylands.
Agassiz’s desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) is a long-lived species native to the Mojave Desert and is listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. To aid conservation efforts for preserving the genetic diversity of this species, we generated a whole genome reference sequence with an annotation based on deep transcriptome sequences of adult skeletal muscle, lung, brain, and blood. The draft genome assembly for G. agassizii has a scaffold N50 length of 252 kbp and a total length of 2.4 Gbp. Genome annotation reveals 20,172 protein-coding genes in the G. agassizii assembly, and that gene structure is more similar to chicken than other turtles. We provide a series of comparative analyses demonstrating (1) that turtles are among the slowest-evolving genome-enabled reptiles, (2) amino acid changes in genes controlling desert tortoise traits such as shell development, longevity and osmoregulation, and (3) fixed variants across the Gopherus species complex in genes related to desert adaptations, including circadian rhythm and innate immune response. This G. agassizii genome reference and annotation is the first such resource for any tortoise, and will serve as a foundation for future analysis of the genetic basis of adaptations to the desert environment, allow for investigation into genomic factors affecting tortoise health, disease and longevity, and serve as a valuable resource for additional studies in this species complex.
Data Availability: All genomic and transcriptomic sequence files are available from the NIH-NCBI BioProject database (accession numbers PRJNA352725, PRJNA352726, and PRJNA281763). All genome assembly, transcriptome assembly, predicted protein, transcript, genome annotation, repeatmasker, phylogenetic trees, .vcf and GO enrichment files are available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/EH2S9K).